Pointless Conversations

Management meetings

Do you ever lose the will to live in management meetings? Sometimes they are so bad I want to scoop out my eyeballs with a tea-spoon. I’d do anything to get out of the conversation. I hate futile meetings that are a waste of everybody’s time — usually highly paid people’s time.

Here are a few of the most exasperating conversations I’ve sat in over the past 25 years…

Performance management: Can you see “daylight” between people’s performance?

What is a good example of “meeting expectations”? Is that “solid”? Does everybody agree? Why don’t you have 10% of your population who are “below expectations”? We would all expect the “curve to be normal”.

KPI’s and balanced score cards: Which metrics should have the highest weight?

What is the perfect scorecard, with the perfect weighting, that will promote perfect performance? Which measure is most important: service level or abandon rate, stock turn or weeks cover? How should you balance timeliness, cost and quality?

There is always something that you can improve. If there was nothing that could be better we would still be sitting beside caves waving flaming branches at wild animals. Rather than debating how much there is to improve, why not tackle the reasons people can’t (or won’t) go after it?

Cost control: How do we justify the overspend?

How are we doing versus our budget? Why do we have an overspend? What short-term measures can we take now to ensure we hit our cost target? Could we transfer the funding from another budget? Who can we blame?

Anybody can save money. You can sack the cleaner, cut the number of staff on shift, stop the free coffee or tighten the expense policy. Saving money is easy.

James Lawther is a middle-aged middle manager. To reach this highly elevated position he has worked for many organisations, from supermarkets to tax collectors and has had multiple roles from running a night shift to doing operational research. He gets upset by operations that don't work and mildly apoplectic about poor customer service.

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